Search results for ""Verso Books""
Verso Books The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire
The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren't straightforwardly opposing forces.In this groundbreaking work, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin demonstrate the intimate relationship between modern capitalism and the American state. The Making of Global Capitalism identifies the centrality of the social conflicts that occur within states rather than between them. These emerging fault lines hold out the possibility of new political movements that might transcend global markets.
£27.99
Verso Books The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power)
Celebrity philanthropy comes in many guises, but no single figure better encapsulates its delusions, pretensions and wrongheadedness than U2's iconic frontman, Bono-a fact neither sunglasses nor leather pants can hide. More than a mere philanthropist-indeed, he lags behind many of his peers when it comes to parting with his own money-Bono is better described as an advocate, one who has become an unwitting symbol of a complacent wealthy Western elite.The Frontman reveals how Bono moved his investments to Amsterdam to evade Irish taxes; his paternalistic and often bullying advocacy of neoliberal solutions in Africa; his multinational business interests; and his hobnobbing with Paul Wolfowitz and shock-doctrine economist Jeffrey Sachs. Carefully dissecting the rhetoric and actions of Bono the political operator, The Frontman shows him to be an ambassador for imperial exploitation, a man who has turned his attention to a world of savage injustice, inequality and exploitation-and helped make it worse.
£11.24
Verso Books Critique of Instrumental Reason
These essays, written between 1949 and 1967, focus on a single theme: the triumph in the twentieth century of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and 'instrumental reason' and the concomitant liquidation of the individual and the basic social institutions and relationships associated with the individual.
£16.53
Verso Books From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of 'Socialism in One Country'
Ernest Mandel's book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of Western Europe. Mandel traces the long historical process which has transformed the once embattled detachments of the Third International into the constitutionalist formations of "historic compromise" and "union of the people" today. He then goes on to argue that the national roads to socialism of contemporary Eurocommunism are the "bitter fruits of socialism in one country" in the USSR.Mandel's book contains trenchant and documented criticisms of the ideas of Santiago Carrillo in Spain, the economic policies of the PCI in Italy, and the PCF's theories of the State in France. But it also sets these Western developments in the context of European politics as a whole-discussing the Russian response to Carrillo, the organizational attitudes of the CPSU to the Western parties, and the emergence of major dissident currents in Eastern Germany sympathetic to Eurocommunism.From Stalinism to Eurocommunism represents the first systematic and comprehensive critique from the Marxist Left of the new strategy of Western Communism. It can be read as a barometer of the storms ahead in the European labour movement.
£18.28
Verso Books The Making of the Second Cold War
We are living through the Second Cold War, yet what is it? Millions in East and West now fear a nuclear conflict, yet confrontation and panic continue to obscure understanding of the processes that might trigger a "hot" war. Fred Halliday presents a clearly written anatomy of these international tensions. He identifies the chief cause of cold war as the globalized contest between the USA and USSR and the arms race in which these states are engaged. He then explains the five main elements of the conflict: the relative decline in US nuclear strategic superiority since the 1960s; the new wave of Third World revolutions; the political stalemate of the post-capitalist states; the rise of the New Right in the USA; and the sharpened contradictions between the Western countries themselves.The Making of the Second Cold War provides a careful, integrated political history of international developments since the 1960s. No other book on the subject has the same range, or attempts to knit together all the factors that have produced the contemporary world situation.
£22.66
Verso Books Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) is now recognized as a philosopher and cultural critic of the greatest importance, his subtle and profound developments of utopian Marxism as influential for the student New Left of the 1960s and 1970s as they were for the leftist movements of the twenties. Today, in the United States and Britain, his enormous body of work is attracting new generations of readers: more translations are appearing, and his utopian thought is finding a new resonance in many different contexts.Several of the authors here address the centrality of a radically unconventional concept of utopia to Bloch's thought; others write on the question of memory and pedagogical theory. There is a Blochian reading of crime fiction, illuminating overviews of Bloch's work and an exploration of the stylistics of hope in Bloch's Spuren, as well as a translation of excerpts from that extraordinary book.The essays gathered here are intended, above all, to recommend Bloch's work as a challenge to older models of historical materialism and utopian emancipation, and to give specific examples of how that work can contribute to current debates about utopia, nationalism and collective memory, the liberatory content of popular cultural forms, and the complex relationship between ideology and everyday life. Together they provide a timely introduction to one of the most untimely and inspiring thinkers of the twentieth century.
£20.04
Verso Books Bloody Panico
The most successful political party in history?The Tory Party has been in power for eighty-five of the past 135 years. In 2019 they won their largest parliamentary majority in more than three decades. They have had a long way to fall since, and they’ve done it at incredible speed.As Geoffrey Wheatcroft shows, we have witnessed not simply the collapse of the party but the shattering of its very foundations. Bloody Panico! opens the sorry tale with the Tories’ return to power in 2010, with ‘Call Me Dave’Cameron at the helm. The turmoil of the referendum followed, as Boris championed a Leave campaign he didn’t believe in for supporters with no clear idea what they were demanding.Beyond the pantomime of Boris, Truss’s kamikazee premiership, and the squirming managerial tedium of Sunak, the party is riven by resentment and confusion. It is a maelstrom of petty and shameless in-fighting. The Tories’ ancient i
£15.17
Verso Books The EU: An Obituary
With Britain leaving the EU, now is the time for an obituary for the EU as an institution. In this short, rigorously argued book, updated after Brexit, John R. Gillingham tells the history of an idea that has soured and withered away. He reveals the failures from its postwar origins to set out what the EU was; the role that Delors played in creating the neoliberal monster it is today, and the contemporary - crises; refugees, Brexit, the Euro - that the current institution fails to deal with.
£19.79
Verso Books Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace
On just the second day of his first term, Barack Obama appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special envoy for Middle East peace and boldly asserted that his administration would "actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians." At the outset of Obama's second term, here is the first hard-hitting analysis of why the administration has entirely failed on this issue, a failure brought on in part because of Obama's wrongheaded obeisance to Israeli policy and its US advocates.Written in a clear and accessible style by the director of a national peace organization who has also been a Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service, this book offers an informed history of the Obama administration's policies and maps out a progressive path forward.
£15.29
Verso Books Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
First published in 1995, this acclaimed study challenges generally accepted truths of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as much of the revisionist literature. This new edition critically reexamines dominant popular and scholarly images in the light of the current failures of the peace process.
£22.66
Verso Books Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague
Marc Perelman pulls no punches in this succinct and searing broadside, assailing the 'recent form of barbarism' that is the global sporting event. Forget the Olympics and consider, under Perelman's guidance, the ledger of inequities maintained by such supposedly harmless games.They have provided a smokescreen for the forcible removal of 'undesirables'; aided governments in the pursuit of racist agendas; affirmed the hypocrisy of drug-testing in an industry where doping is more an imperative than an aberration; and developed the pornographic hybrid that Perelman dubs 'sporn', a further twist in our corrupt obsession with the body.Drawing examples from the modern history of the international sporting event, Perelman argues that today's colosseums, upheld as examples of 'health', have become the steamroller for a decadent age fixated on competition, fame and elitism.
£12.99
Verso Books Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financial assets.The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live-all now swell asset managers' bulging investment portfolios.As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In this eye-opening follow-up to Rentier Capitalism, Brett Christophers peels back the veil on ""asset manager society.""Asset managers, he shows, are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them.In asset manager society, the natural and built environments that sustain us become one more vehicle for siphoning money from the many to the few.
£20.00
Verso Books Hit Parade of Tears
A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer's work.
£14.95
Verso Books Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics
Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the concerns that animated their twentieth-century intellectual forebears. Okoth responds, challenging the claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible and showing that both are embraced in the anti-imperialist tradition he calls 'Red Africa'. The politics of Black revolutionary writers Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised - instead it was betrayed, violently sup- pressed, or erased. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which sustains the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to surrender. Red Africa is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition.
£14.95
Verso Books Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to-or actively engineer-each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable members of their communities. This survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid has been a part of all larger, powerful social movements, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Mutual aid isn't charity: it's a form of organizing where people get to create new systems of care and generosity so we can survive.
£11.64
Verso Books The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Novel of Ideas
The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat is a brilliant fictional journey through Western political philosophy by one of our most original thinkers. Professor Caritat, a middle-aged Candide, walks naively through the neighbouring countries of Utilitaria, Communitaria and Libertaria, in his quest to find the best of all possible worlds. Cut loose from the confines of his ivory tower, this wandering professor is made to confront the perplexed state of modern thinking in this dazzling comedy of ideas.
£11.24
Verso Books Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of A Failing State
Britain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further apart. Visiting sites across the British Isles and exploring the social fissures that have emerged, Danny Dorling exposes a new geography of inequality. Middle England has been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis, and even people doing comparatively well are struggling to stay afloat. Once affluent suburbs are now unproductive places where opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Before COVID, life expectancy had dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.Fifty years ago the UK led the world in child health; today, twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU countries have better mortality rates for newborns. No other European country has such miserly unemployment benefits; university fees so high; housing so unaffordable; or a government economically so far to the right. In the spirit of the 1942 Beveridge Report, Dorling identifies the five giants of twenty-first-century poverty that need to be conquered: Hunger, Precarity, Waste, Exploitation, and Fear. He offers powerful insights into how we got here and what we must do in order to save Britain from becoming a failed state.
£15.17
Verso Books Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia's ongoing and active complicity in Israel's settler-colonial project.
£19.99
Verso Books Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet
The environmental crisis under way is unique in human history. It is a true existential crisis. Those alive today will decide the fate of humanity. Meanwhile, the leaders of the most powerful state in human history are dedicating themselves with passion to destroying the prospects for organized human life. At the same time, there is a solution at hand, which is the Green New Deal. Putting meat on the bones of the Green New Deal starts with a single simple idea: we have to absolutely stop burning fossil fuels to produce energy within the next 30 years at most; and we have to do this in a way that also supports rising living standards and expanding opportunities for working people and the poor throughout the world. This version of a Green New Deal program is, in fact, entirely realistic in terms of its purely economic and technical features. The real question is whether it is politically feasible. Chomsky and Pollin examine how we can build the political force to make a global Green New Deal a reality.
£12.99
Verso Books Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World
What should a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. Through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. She maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and care-full cities together.
£14.59
Verso Books Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasised the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.By practising what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums - to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics.Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as "past" and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.
£30.00
Verso Books How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called "great divergence" between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the the multiplication of global inequality today. In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism.
£18.91
Verso Books New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension.In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.
£14.83
Verso Books The New Poverty
Today 13 million people are living in poverty in the UK. According to a 2017 report, 1 in 5 children live below the poverty line. The new poor, however, are an even larger group than these official figures suggest. They are more often than not in work, living precariously and betrayed by austerity policies that make affordable good quality housing, good health and secure employment increasingly unimaginable.In The New Poverty investigative journalist Stephen Armstrong travels across Britain to tell the stories of those who are most vulnerable. It is the story of an unreported Britain, abandoned by politicians and betrayed by the retreat of the welfare state. As benefit cuts continue and in-work poverty soars, he asks what long-term impact this will have on post-Brexit Britain and-on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1942 Beveridge report-what we can do to stop the destruction of our welfare state.
£13.60
Verso Books Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy
Why are we so obsessed by the pursuit of happiness? With new ways to measure contentment we are told that we have a right to individual joy. But at what cost? In an age of increasing individualism, we have never been more alone and miserable. But what if the true nature of happiness can only be found in others? In Radical Happiness, leading feminist thinker Lynne Segal believes that we have lost the art of radical happiness- the art of transformative, collective joy. She shows that only in the revolutionary potential of coming together it is that we can come to understand the powers of flourishing. Radical Happiness is a passionate call for the re-discovery of the political and emotional joy that emerge when we learn to share our lives together.
£11.68
Verso Books Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault's biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.
£13.94
Verso Books Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically
Political conflict in our society is inevitable, and the results are often far from negative. How then should we deal with the intractable differences arising from complex modern culture?In Agonistics, Mouffe develops her philosophy, taking particular interest in international relations, strategies for radical politics and the politics of artistic practices. In a series of coruscating essays, she engages with cosmopolitanism, post-operaism, and theories of multiple modernities to argue in favor of a multipolar world with a real cultural and political pluralism.
£18.28
Verso Books The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work
The Imperial Messenger reveals the true value of this media darling, a risible writer whose success tells us much about the failures of contemporary journalism. Belén Fernández dissects the Friedman corpus with wit and journalistic savvy to expose newsroom practices that favor macho rhetoric over serious inquiry, a pacified readership over an empowered one, and reductionist analysis over integrity. The Imperial Messenger is polemic at its best, relentless in its attack on this apologist for American empire and passionate in its commitment to justice.About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writing inaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the words of one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was "running up like parchment in the fire." From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century. In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it's time to revive the tradition. Verso's Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.
£11.24
Verso Books Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens
Irascible and forthright, Christopher Hitchens stood out as a man determined to do just that. In his younger years, a career-minded socialist, he emerged from the smoke of 9/11 a neoconservative "Marxist," an advocate of America's invasion of Iraq filled with passionate intensity. Throughout his life, he played the role of universal gadfly, whose commitment to the truth transcended the party line as well as received wisdom. But how much of this was imposture? In this highly critical study, Richard Seymour casts a cold eye over the career of the "Hitch" to uncover an intellectual trajectory determined by expediency and a fetish for power.As an orator and writer, Hitchens offered something unique and highly marketable. But for all his professed individualism, he remains a recognizable historical type-the apostate leftist. Unhitched presents a rewarding and entertaining case study, one that is also a cautionary tale for our times.
£11.24
Verso Books Lives on the Left: A Group Portrait
The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers.Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Lukács, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jir?i Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, João Pedro Stédile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.New Left Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base ever since. In fifty years of publication, it has won an international reputation as an independent journal of socialist politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every part of the world. A Spanish-language edition is published bi-monthly from Madrid.
£22.49
Verso Books Broonland: The Last Days of Gordon Brown
How did the intellectually intimidating, industrious architect of the New Labour project become its maligned and feckless undertaker? In this scathing, witty indictment of Gordon Brown's tenure as prime minister, Christopher Harvie says goodbye to Broon by exploring the Britain New Labour helped create. It is a place where the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider and manufacturing has been replaced by 'retail, entertainment and recreation' (for which read shopping, gambling and drinking). Now that the casino economy has veered wildly out of control, and our public utilities and industries have been auctioned to the highest bidder, Broonland is both an essential anatomy of a country on the brink of collapse and a caustic, darkly funny portrait of a decade that took Britain from boom through bust to busted.
£10.45
Verso Books Strategy of Deception
Written with his characteristic flair, Virillo's latest book is a trenchant denunciation of the Kosovo war in which he successfully unites theory with a riveting study of the conflict. Tearing aside the veil of hypocrisy in which the USA and its allies wrapped the war, Virillo demonstrates that the nature of the bombing was set by strategic rather than ethical considerations.Beneath the humanitarian rhetoric, Virillo sees a sinister innovation in the methods of waging war: territorial space is being replaced by orbital space in which a system of global telesurveillance is linked to the destructive power of bombers and missiles. Governments, the military and the media are becoming part of a seamless and self-justifying process linked by new information and arms technologies.Passionate and political, Strategy of Deception is a vital examination not only of the war in Yugoslavia but also what Virillo calls our "fin-de-siécle infantilization" in which the reality of battle is reduced to flickering images on a screen.
£8.88
Verso Books Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America
In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections, featuring the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1, as well as some of the world's leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Zizek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit.The book conveys the intense excitement of those present at the birth of a counterculture, while providing the movement with a serious platform for debating goals, demands, and tactics. Articles address the history of the "horizontalist" structure at OWS; how to keep a live-in going when there is a giant mountain of laundry building up; how very rich the very rich have become; the messages and meaning of the "We are the 99%" tumblr website; occupations in Oakland, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere; what happens next; and much more.
£11.24
Verso Books Our Bloc: How We Win
In Our Bloc, Momentum co-founder James Schneider lays out an action plan for the British left. To move from defeatism to renewed confidence, he proposes a Left Bloc: an explicit alliance of socialists in Parliament, the Labour grassroots, the trade unions and social movements.In the wake of Corbyn's defeat, Schneider makes a bold argument: the central question is not whether to stay in or leave the Labour Party. Instead, we should focus on federating our forces - to strengthen our movements and voices today, and lay the ground to construct the party we need to enter the state tomorrow.Now is not the moment to scale back our ambitions. Climate shocks, rising debt, inequality and energy costs are hard barriers to neoliberalism's viability. If we can build power and prepare to seize the moment, we have a world to win.
£10.45
Verso Books The Twilight of Unionism: Ulster and the Future of Northern Ireland
The fissures that have split the United Kingdom in the last decades have run through Northern Ireland. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the fragile peace has been threatened by Brexit, the rise and fall of the D U P and the failure of power-sharing arrangement between the main parties at the Stormont Assembly. As the very future of Northern Ireland is now in jeopardy, will Britain face up to its imperial legacy and address the deep inequalities that remain in the aftermath of the Troubles, and the uneven development of the 'New Ireland'?Geoffrey Bell offers an insightful history of Ulster Unionism from the 1960s to the present day. In recent years this has come to a crisis point. What is the future of the Union in the post-Brexit reality? How will the relationship between Northern Ireland and Westminster develop? Can the United Kingdom survive?
£15.17
Verso Books Is Socialism Possible in Britain?: Reflections on the Corbyn Years
Selected as one of the 15 best political and current affairs books of 2022 by The TimesIs Socialism Possible in Britain? analyses Jeremy Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader and the prospects for parliamentary socialism in a post-Corbyn Britain. Lively and insightful, it is informed by an insider's view of the most radical period in Labour's history. A veteran of the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray was seconded to Corbyn's office from the Unite trade union and witnessed an extraordinary daily bombardment from sections of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the media. He candidly assesses the leadership's response to the antisemitism controversy and the dilemmas of Brexit, as well as Keir Starmer's restoration of a turgid neo-Blairism. The problems that beset Corbyn are likely to confront any similar political project. Is Socialism Possible in Britain? explores how they can be more effectively addressed in the future - a future which we must hope is not so far away.
£14.99
Verso Books Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity
For sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of "whiteness" - a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late firebrand covers the breadth of his life and insights as an autodidact steel worker, a groundbreaking theoretician, and a bitter enemy of racists everywhere.In these essays, Ignatiev confronts the Weather Underground and recounts which strategies proved most effective to winning white workers in Gary, Indiana, to black liberation. He discovers the prescient political insights of the nineteenth-century abolition movement, surveys the wreckage of the revolutionary twentieth century with C.L.R. James, and attends to the thorny and contradictory nature of working-class consciousness. Through it all, our attentions are turned to the everyday life of "ordinary" people, whose actions anticipate a wholly new society they have not yet recognized or named.In short, Ignatiev reflects on the incisive questions of his time and ours: How can we drive back the forces of racism in society? How can the so-called "white" working class be won over to emancipatory politics? How can we build a new human community?
£25.00
Verso Books Ever Closer Union?: Europe in the West
The European Union is a political order of peculiar stamp and continental scope, its polity of 446 million the third largest on the planet, though with famously little purchase on the conduct of its representatives. Sixty years after the founding treaty, what sort of structure has crystallised, and does the promise of ever closer union still obtain?Against the self-image of the bloc, Perry Anderson poses the historical record of its assembly. He traces the wider arc of European history, from First World War to Eurozone crisis, the hegemony of Versailles to that of Maastricht, and casts the work of the EU's leading contemporary analysts - both independent critics and court philosophers - in older traditions of political thought. Are there likenesses to the age of Metternich, lessons in statecraft from that of Machiavelli? An excursus on the UK's jarring departure from the Union considers the responses it has met with inside the country's intelligentsia, from the contrite to the incandescent. How do Brussels and Westminster compare as constitutional forms? Differently put, which could be said to be worse?
£16.99
Verso Books Feminism or Death: How the Women's Movement Can Save the Planet
Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d'Eaubonne surveyed women's status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but about life and death-for humans and the planet. In this wide-ranging manifesto, d'Eaubonne first proposed a politics of ecofeminism, the idea that the patriarchal system's claim over women's bodies and the natural world destroys both, and that feminism and environmentalism must bring about a new 'mutation'-an overthrow of not just male power but the system of power itself. As d'Eaubonne prophesied, "the planet placed in the feminine will flourish for all."Never before published in English, and translated here by French feminist scholar Ruth Hottell, this edition includes an introduction from scholars of ecology and feminism situating d'Eaubonne's work within current feminist theory, environmental justice organizing, and anticolonial feminism.
£20.00
Verso Books Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
"I have been in the world, but not of it," W.E.B. Du Bois begins this book, a continuation of the project he began in his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk, describing the devastation of segregation, slavery, and the global color line that veiled half the world's people in shadow. First published in 1920, Darkwater gives voice to the rising power of "the darker races" around the world, and includes Africa's blistering indictment of Europe, a study of the curious and twisted souls of white folk, and his landmark essay "The Damnation of Women," in which he most seriously explores women's oppression and the double burdens forced onto black women. Combining essays and analysis with poetry, allegory, and short fiction, Darkwater is an angry and eloquent argument that, as Du Bois writes, "a belief in humanity is a belief in colored men."With a new introduction from award-winning poet and novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and a historical preface by Manning Marable.
£11.24
Verso Books We Uyghurs Have No Say: An Imprisoned Writer Speaks
In Xinjiang, the large northwest region of China, the government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in re-education camps. One of the incarcerated--whose sentence, unlike most others, has no end date--is Ilham Tohti, an intellectual and economist, a prolific writer, and formerly the host of a website, Uyghur Online. In 2014, Tohti was arrested; accused of advocating separatism, violence, and the overthrow of the Chinese government; subjected to a two-day trial; and sentenced to life. Nothing has been heard from him since.Here are Tohti's own words, a collection of his plain-spoken calls for justice, scholarly explanations of the history of Xinjiang, and poignant personal reflections. While his courage and outspokenness about the plight of China's Muslim minorities is extraordinary, these essays sound a measured insistence on peace and just treatment for the Uyghurs.Winner of the PEN/Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought while imprisoned, this book is nonetheless the only way to hear from a man who has been called "a Uyghur Mandela".
£15.17
Verso Books The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. Historical debate about the origin of racial slavery has focused on the status of the Negro in seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland. However, as Theodore W. Allen argues in this magisterial work, what needs to be studied is the transformation of English, Scottish, Irish and other European colonists from their various statuses as servants, tenants, planters or merchants into a single new all-inclusive status: that of whites. This is the key to the paradox of American history, of a democracy resting on race assumptions.Volume One of this two-volume work attempts to escape the 'white blind spot' which has distorted consecutive studies of the issue. It does so by looking in the mirror of Irish history for a definition of racial oppression and for an explanation of that phenomenon in terms of social control, free from the absurdities of classification by skin color. Compelling analogies are presented between the history of Anglo-Irish and British rule in Ireland and American White Supremacist oppression of Indians and African-Americans. But the relativity of race is shown in the sea change it entailed, whereby emigrating Irish haters of racial oppression were transformed into White Americans who defended it. The reasons for the differing outcomes of Catholic Emancipation and Negro Emancipation are considered and occasion is made to demonstrate Allen's distinction between racial and national oppression.
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Verso Books Going to My Father's House: A History of My Times
A historian's personal journey into the complex questions of immigration, home and nationFrom Ireland to London in the 1950s, Derry in the Troubles to contemporary, de-industrialised Manchester, Joyce finds the ties of place, family and the past are difficult to break. Why do certain places continue to haunt us? What does it mean to be British after the suffering of Empire and of war? How do we make our home in a hypermobile world without remembering our pasts?Patrick Joyce's parents moved from Ireland in the 1930s and made their home in west London. But they never really left the homeland. And so as he grew up among the streets of Paddington and Notting Hill and when he visited his family in Ireland he felt a tension between the notions of home, nation and belonging. Going to My Father's House charts the historian's attempt to make sense of these ties and to see how they manifest in a globalised world. He explores the places - the house, the street, the walls and the graves - that formed his own identity. He ask what place the ideas of history, heritage and nostalgia have in creating a sense of our selves. He concludes with a plea for a history that holds the past to account but also allows for dynamic, inclusive change.
£25.00
Verso Books One-Way Street: And Other Writings
Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions. This collection, introduced by Susan Sontag, contains the most representative and illuminating selection of his work over a twenty-year period, and thus does full justice to the richness and the multi-dimensional nature of his thought. Included in these pages are aphorisms and townscapes, esoteric meditation and reminiscences of childhood, and reflections on language, psychology, aesthetics and politics.
£14.55
Verso Books Futures of Socialism: The Pandemic and the Post-Corbyn Era
British politics is in an extraordinary place. Grace Blakeley introduces an indispensable collection of analysis and comment.In Futures of Socialism, Sam Gindin and James Meadway reassess socialist strategy after the coronavirus; Dalia Gebrial and Siân Errington debate austerity and precarity; Joshua Virasami and Simukai Chigudu explore anti-racism and the legacy of Empire; and Leo Panitch and Momentum co-founder James Schneider probe the limits of parliamentary socialism. Chris Saltmarsh assesses the prospects for an eco-socialist Green New Deal and Cat Hobbs argues for the ongoing centrality of public ownership to socialist policy.Futures of Socialism takes an in-depth look at the reasons for Labour's 2019 election defeat, with Unite's Andrew Murray on Labour's Brexit position, Tom Mills on the British media, Gargi Bhattacharyya and Jeremy Gilbert on better ways to build a political project, and Keir Milburn on generation left. The anthology also compares the fortunes of the British left with socialist movements overseas, in despatches from Europe and America.Blakeley draws on the talents of all sections of the post-Corbyn left to survey the prospects of 'a movement that has dominated the horizons of our lives'.
£15.17
Verso Books Only a Voice: Essays
In Only a Voice, George Scialabba examines the chasm between modernity's promise of progress and the sobering reality of our present day through studies of the most influential public intellectuals of our time. In Scialabba's hands, literary criticism becomes a powerful tool for expressing political passion and demonstrating the generative power of argument and an inquisitive mind. Drawing together a diverse group of thinkers, artists, activists, and philosophers-including Edward Said, D. H. Lawrence, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ellen Willis, and Noam Chomsky-Scialabba tours western intellectual history to find that no matter the stakes, critical thought remains a necessary precondition for politics.Every writer, Scialabba writes, faces the choice of whether "to tilt at the state and capital or ignore them" - and the world now is too dire not to choose the former.
£20.00
Verso Books The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776-1888
The Age of Revolution (1776-1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean but a 'Second Slavery' surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, powered by demand for plantation produce and a system of financial credit that leveraged the value of the slaves. By 1860, more than 6 million captives of African descent toiled to produce the cotton, sugar and coffee craved by global consumers. This 'Second Slavery' mimicked capitalist disciplines, intensified slavery's racial character and launched half a century of headlong economic growth.On the eve of the American Civil War, the Slave Power seemed invincible. The slaveholding elite entrenched their 'peculiar institution' in the fabric of the Union only to risk everything on secession. Nobody solicited the slaves' wishes until it became clear that, wherever they could, they were deserting the plantations and joining the Union forces.Abolition radicals destroyed the Second Slavery and victory for the North also spelled defeat for slavery in Cuba and Brazil. But in each of these societies racial oppression was to be reconfigured by 'Black Codes', Jim Crow and toxic doctrines of racial destiny.Slavery leaves an indelible mark on many Atlantic nations. The Reckoning charts the historic impact of slavery and anti-slavery, of black and white activists, of fugitive slaves, feminists, writers, clerics and soldiers. Notwithstanding much unfinished business, the anti-slavery struggle retains its capacity to illuminate and inspire.
£31.50
Verso Books Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge
This is your nation's history on drugsAmericans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics-across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?Quick Fixes blows away the pharmacological fog to take a sober look at how drugs have shaped American society. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America's passionate love for and intense hatred of these sub - stances has been one of its defining characteristics for over a century. Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans' fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes, it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, affect the development and spread of medications and narcotics among the populace.By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical com - forts, the hope is to help answer that ever-perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?
£16.99